Normally I'm on the other side of these debates... but has the lack of Internet surveillance ever before prevented the U.S. (or other nations) from blackmailing, coercing, influencing elections or otherwise committing acts of war against a country?
The solution is to ensure good people are elected and that good oversight and accountability controls are in place... but that would also help with law enforcement and national security programs, if implemented.
No, governments have and will do whatever is possible to commit act of wars against any country to serve its own interest. But the issue is that in this digital era, the power that governments exercise is exponentially larger than in the past and the room for potential abuse has also grown substantially with it. History has show that even with little power (as compared to now), many great awful things have been done.
Things get progressively worse and people get used to them. Today it has been revealed that all our communication channels are tapped. People will make arguments that they have nothing to hide and even if not, they will soon forget and learn to live with it. Tomorrow, governments around will ask for your fingerprints and retina scans (this is already happening in India). People will meh and get over it. Then they will install cameras everywhere and try to track all your movements. Given the amount of electronics surrounding us, cameras would be just another in heap and people won't budge. We are technologists and we know that though hard, these things are possible to implement at a national level.
You said that the solution is to ensure that good people are elected. It is very much important to do that asap. The system is turning more opaque every second. As governments accrue more power over the lives of citizens, it will harder to take govt down if things go wrong. Snowden did what is defined as "illegal" but the law is wrong in the first place. People are moaning over the internet that what NSA is doing is unconstitutional but has it achieved much yet? Petitioning the White House isn't probably going to get any proper answer. NSA didn't ask people whether they were OK with such surveillance, it was all decided behind closed doors. Even in a system where you can openly ask representatives and govt about its actions and they are not answering, so just think of the future when questioning the government's motives will land you a red ticket.
>The solution is to ensure good people are elected and that good oversight and accountability controls are in place...
The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.
This is the theory behind the FISA court etc., to provide a body which is responsible for restraining bad actors. But then the court itself is secret and you fall into the same trap: The court hears from the government but not the target or the public or the EFF or anyone with an incentive to argue the contrary position, which encourages it to have a strong bias in favor of the government, and the outcomes are secret so the court itself has no accountability to anyone and becomes a rubber stamp.
> The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.
That's true. That's what needs to go into the design of accountable systems. In the end you have to trust people in a system that must have secret parts, but that doesn't mean there are not ways to design oversight systems to reduce the risk of regulatory capture and lone wolves, and still expand transparency to much higher levels than currently exist. I would even argue it's possible to do without appreciably compromising operational security.
Organizations like EFF or ACLU are actually a great idea in that regard, IMO.
>Organizations like EFF or ACLU are actually a great idea in that regard, IMO.
I might agree if it weren't for the fact that they're catastrophically under-funded. It would fall apart unless their funding somehow scaled sustainably with the number of cases they had to argue. That is very unlikely to come from public donations if they're doing something the public can't observe. And if the funding is to come from the government then I wonder what you would propose to prevent it from experiencing the same failures that have plagued existing public defenders (i.e. police+prosecutors get more resources and congressional sympathy).
The solution is to ensure good people are elected and that good oversight and accountability controls are in place... but that would also help with law enforcement and national security programs, if implemented.